


Serena Campbell's Travels in Time

by Persiflage



Series: Mashed Up Tropes Fics [24]
Category: Holby City
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bernie Wolfe Lives, Bernie Wolfe: World's Okay-est Lesbian, Canon Compliant Until it's not!, Canonical Character Death, Elinor Campbell Dies, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Mash-up, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Serena Campbell: Bisexual Extraordinaire, Time Travel, Trope de Trope, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:21:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29019618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Persiflage/pseuds/Persiflage
Summary: Serena Campbell discovers a time travel device and visits her mother, her daughter, and her lover as they lie dying.
Relationships: Elinor Campbell & Serena Campbell, Serena Campbell & Adrienne McKinnie, Serena Campbell/Bernie Wolfe
Series: Mashed Up Tropes Fics [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960414
Comments: 9
Kudos: 28





	Serena Campbell's Travels in Time

**Author's Note:**

> Written for an lonesomebeliever (on Tumblr) for the Mashed Up Tropes Meme on Tumblr, for the tropes: 38. Grief Fic and 97. Time Travel. This one's canon compliant, until it's not...

At first Serena Campbell doesn’t realise she’s found a time travel device (if you’d asked her before she found the locket if she believed in time travel she would have looked at you like you were a sandwich short of a picnic). It’s old and gold, and shaped like a book. She finds it aesthetically pleasing, so she slips the chain around her neck, then carefully opens the book. 

Next thing she knows she’s in Holby City hospital, at her daughter’s bedside. Her dying daughter. She snaps the locket closed, shocked to her boots at the sight of Elinor, and the next moment she’s standing in the guest room she’d converted into a storage space for both Elinor’s and Adrienne’s things – among the latter of which she had found the locket.

It’s a couple of days before she opens the locket again. This time she’s sitting at Adrienne’s bedside, and before she can consider the wisdom of it, she begins talking to her mother, telling her all the things she never said before, but wanted to.

Her third journey takes her back to Elinor again, but this time she talks to Ellie in much the same way as she’d talked to Adrienne.

It’s another week before Serena opens the locket for the fourth (and, as it turns out, final) time, and this time she finds herself at the bedside of Berenice Wolfe. And that’s an entirely different kind of shock to the travelling in time because she hadn’t known Bernie was injured? Dying? She’s unclear and it takes her several long moments before she makes her feet move and she rounds the bed to pull out the chart and look at it. Bernie, her brave, wonderful Berenice Wolfe, was injured in an explosion (Again? Serena thinks, despairingly) at the airport, to which she’d gone to collect her things after shipping them from Nairobi to Mogadishu. Despite her own injury, Bernie had gone to assist some of the other injured people until, eventually, she’d collapsed owing to the blood loss and internal damage. Now she lies in a coma and she isn’t expected to wake again.

Serena collapses into the chair at her bedside, clasps a cold hand in both of her own, and sobs, sobs even more deeply than she did over either her mother or her daughter. 

She’s shocked yet again when, after dozing off with Bernie’s hand (still clasped between her own) pressed against her heart, the hand in question twitches strongly against her blouse. She opens her eyes and stares in disbelief as Bernie’s eyes struggle open and a familiar half smile just curls the corners of her mouth.

“Hello you,” rasps the trauma surgeon.

“Hello yourself,” Serena responds, her own voice still husky from all the tears she’s spilled over this woman this afternoon.

After staring at each other for some time, Serena leans in to press a chaste kiss against her lover’s mouth, then she pulls back and says, “I’d better get a nurse. You weren’t expected to survive.”

“Do you mind that I did, Campbell?” Bernie asks.

“I could never mind that, Major,” Serena returns, then steps outside to let the staff know that Major Wolfe won’t be mustering out just yet after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](https://pers-books.tumblr.com/post/629342537189031936/lonesomebeliever-askedfor-the-mash-up-trope-meme).


End file.
